Discord is banned in Turkiye. The reason is some data theft, blackmail, AI montage photos, etc. As usual, our government made the easiest and most illogical move :)
I am looking for an alternative platform to talk and chat with my friends. Which platforms do you recommend?
The ones I tried:
- Revolt: Voice chat is not stable. They do not accept new registrations.
- Matrix: Unstable overall.
- TeamSpeak: ancient interface. We can still try it.
- XMPP: It has an old interface like TS. Not sure if it has voice channels.
- Your recommendations?
How about Guilded?
IRC: it’s open source, it’s free, its retro
matrix: unstable overall
“Unstable” is an understatement, and this comes from a girl who uses it all day every day.
Isn’t it generally better if you use a smaller instance/host your own? Most of the complaints I’ve heard have been on the busier instances.
That said, I only use it occasionally to catch up on dev updates.
KiwiIRC is a web based IRC client. Does not have voice chat afaik, but since it’s IRC it’s very lightweight and had a low entry barrier.
Teamspeak 3 is ancient, but works.
However there is a new version of Teamspeak (TS5) which is much closer to Discord and looks much nicer. You could give that a try
There was a TS4?
There’s guilded, have an old guild leader in tech that always tries to get us to be guinea pigs for different voips, and that one isn’t terrible if discord isn’t available.
Ventrilo, is that even around anymore?
Mumble wasn’t too bad,
You could self host revolt.
SimpleX or Signal. Not sure if they work on desktop though.
Signal should still have a desktop app, I believe
If only it synced messages with the mobile app properly
I use it on mobile and desktop regularly without sync issues. Has it always had that problem for you? I generally always get messages at the exact same time without fail.
I don’t have it on desktop anymore, but if I install it now, the desktop app won’t have any conversations that I have on my phone. I use a Matrix bridge instead that doesn’t forget messages.
Correct, it will only have all future messages. Nothing historic. But it should sync literally everything going forward.
Well, I don’t like this. The idea of sacrificing messaging history in favour of illusory security gains doesn’t sit well with me. Same goes for Signal backups.
I use Steam Chat for playing games with family and friends. It has better audio quality than discord in my opinion, and you can make groups (something like Discord servers) too. It doesn’t have all the functionality of servers, but the basic idea is there.
I am actually surprised nobody mentioned it yet Why use some third party application, when you can use the Steam’s one.
It’s not like the OP is concerned about privacy. They were using discord. They didn’t say it has to be open source.
For talking outside of gaming or away from PC, I use signal.
To those suggesting mumble, are there any good guides out there? The website is shockingly bad for introductory information.
https://github.com/mumble-voip/mumble-docker
myself, I run a docker container of mumble in casaOS
Theres also zulip, but I havent tried it yet, but its supposedly open source discord, but you have to host the server yourself I think.
I don’t recommend Zulip as Discord alternative. It’s interesting take on slack-ish type of messenger, but not really “polished” experience for now.
self-hosting matrix is possible, and after I got it set up, it works fine. That said, push notifications were acting up a lot at first (might have been fixed by an update since that hasn’t been an issue in a while), and it is rather annoying to get your desktop and mobile clients set up to not be annoying about not being verified (iOS apps seem more fiddly with verifying than Android apps in my experience)
Despite my annoyances at first, the Element client really is the best and most mature one out there, and I do recommend it. Don’t bother with any of the other ones; despite what the fluffychat settings want you to think, Element is the only client that can do any kind of audio/video calling, and most of the other clients only have web apps, so there’s no hope for getting push notifications on mobile.
Ultimately it has worked for me, but my demands are three humans in a voice call once a week, no screenshare (use Parsec for that), and occasional text messages.
Discord was based off of Slack and Microsoft Teams is a trash knockoff. All depends what you intend to use it for.
Matrix is probably the closest to Discord overall. If Element is bugging out on you, it might be worth trying other clients. Nheko worked well when I tried it, for example.
Mumble.info is great for voice. If your text chat needs are pretty basic, it might be a good fit. I don’t think it saves message history.
XMPP is a protocol, not an app. If you you saw an interface you didn’t like, you could always just use a different app. I don’t usually recommend it, since setting it up with all the features people usually expect is a bit complicated and error-prone, but it would probably be manageable among a small group of friends if one of them has tech skills. I don’t think it offers voice, at least not in any widely-supported way.
Our group uses mumble for voice and discord for text and backup voice or external voice. The voice quality is better, free, faster on mumble. Extremely low server requirements. It technically saves chat history but as server logs, not for the client.
What do you do when you want to share your screen?
I think that’s most of the alternatives. Revolt is the best of the bunch, if you ask me.
One more is https://tryquiet.org/ but it’s SUPER basic at this time…
